Anne Thompson - Living Fearlessly

by Laura Shipp

Cancer isn’t about dying, it is
about living.I know, I’ve been
living with cancer for the past
year, and you’ve been watching me.
These words, penned by NBC News’
chief environmental affairs correspondent
Anne Thompson, began a
confession of sorts, a divulgence of
a secret that Anne had kept from her
television audience, and many of her
NBC colleagues, for a year. The response
from viewers, she confides in
an interview with Coping® magazine,
“blew me away.”

Anne was diagnosed with breast
cancer in March 2006. She decided
early on that work would be her “cancer-
free zone.” As a journalist, she
wanted to keep her diagnosis private.
“My job is to get people to talk about
themselves or an issue they’re involved
in. And nothing stops a conversation
quicker than to say, ‘I have cancer.’
And I didn’t want the focus to be on
me,” Anne says. “If my appearance
changed dramatically and I didn’t look
good, I didn’t want to be on the air
because that would detract from my
story. I didn’t want to be the story.”

The chemotherapy treatments Anne
underwent to shrink her tumor caused
her to lose all her hair, including her
eyelashes and eyebrows. To keep up
appearances on air, she added a few
extra steps to her hair and makeup
routine. “I wore two wigs that I nicknamed
‘Mata Hari’ after the glamorous
World War I spy because I felt anything
but glamorous. One looked like
I had just gotten my hair cut. The
other looked like I needed a haircut,”
Anne recalls with a bit of laughter,
hinting that she is glad to be done
with those wigs.

‘Every day is going to have a moment to savor’

She adds that she used wax and
powder to create new eyebrows to replace
the ones she had lost. And she
wore false eyelashes to further conceal
her hair loss. “Although I have
to tell you,” Anne confesses, “I really
never got the hang of false eyelashes.
It was just impossible.”

When I ask what made her decide
to speak publicly about her cancer
diagnosis, Anne recalls the media
frenzy that arose when two prominent
political figures experienced cancer
recurrences. “As I was listening to the
commentary about Elizabeth Edwards
and Tony Snow when they revealed
that their cancers had returned,” she
says, “it really made me angry because
people on TV, on the radio, and in the
newspaper were essentially digging
graves for them. And I thought, ‘This
is crazy. People with cancer want to
live. They want to participate. They
want to contribute.’

“And cancer brings that into focus
as sharply as anything that I can imagine
because it so changes your sense of
the future, you don’t know what your
future is going to be. And so, the present
that you have, you so desperately
want to participate in it. I thought,
‘Wow, I’ve worked for a year with
cancer and none of the viewers knew.
I’ve done it. They can do it.’ You
can contribute. You can be a valuable
member of your community, of your
company, of your family even though
you have this disease.”

On the urging of her friend and
colleague NBC Nightly News anchor
Brian Williams, Anne agreed to post
the short essay quoted above on his
msnbc.com blog. More accustomed
to reporting the story than to being the
story, Anne has been overwhelmed by
the support she has received. “I just
never anticipated that people would
either be so interested, or so encouraging,
when I told them about what
I had been going through for the past
year,” she says, adding that it also
helped explain her very short haircut.

Anne says she is now doing things
that she might never have done before
cancer, like climbing Australia’s Sydney
Harbour Bridge though she is
petrified of heights. She also admits
that the fear of her cancer returning
is something that will probably never
completely go away. But she realizes
that she can’t spend her life
being afraid.

“I decided that instead of living
with fear, or living in fear, I was going
to live fearlessly,” Anne says, “and
that I was going to enjoy every single
day that God gives me. I no longer
have time to be unhappy. It’s a luxury
I can’t afford. Every day is going to
have a moment to savor. And if things
make me unhappy, and I can’t fix
them, I’m moving on.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Anne Thompson can be
seen reporting on environmental issues
like global warming and alternative fuels
on all NBC News broadcasts, including
NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams,
Today, and MSNBC.

This article was printed from copingmag.com and was originally published in Coping® with Cancer magazine,
September/October
2007.